• China’s Cyber Interference and Transnational Crime Groups in Southeast Asia

    The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of engagement with criminal organizations and proxies to achieve its strategic objectives. This activity involves the Chinese government’s spreading of influence and disinformation campaigns using fake personas and inauthentic accounts on social media that are linked to transnational criminal organizations.

  • The Promise—and Pitfalls—of Researching Extremism Online

    While online spaces are key enablers for extremist movements, social media research hasn’t provided many answers to fundamental questions. How big of a problem is extremism, in the United States or around the world? Is it getting worse? Are social media platforms responsible, or did the internet simply reveal existing trends? Why do some people become violent?

  • Six Things to Watch Following Meta's Threads Launch

    Meta’s ‘Twitter killer,’ Threads, launched on July 6 to media fanfare. With another already politically charged U.S. election on the horizon, online hate and harassment at record highs, and a rise in antisemitism and extremist incidents both on- and offline, a new social media product of this scale will present serious challenges.

  • Fact Check: Why Do we Believe Fake News?

    Fake news has become a real threat to society. Some internet users are more likely to accept misinformation and fake news as true information than others. How do psychological and social factors influence whether we fall for them or not? And what can we do against it?

  • Preliminary Injunction Limiting Government Communications with Platforms Tackles Illegal “Jawboning,” but Fails to Provide Guidance on What’s Unconstitutional

    A July 4 preliminary injunction issued by a federal judge in Louisiana limiting government contacts with social media platforms deals with government “jawboning” is a serious issue deserving serious attention and judicial scrutiny. The court order is notable as the first to hold the government accountable for unconstitutional jawboning of social media platforms, but it is not the serious examination of jawboning issues that is sorely needed. The court did not distinguish between unconstitutional and constitutional interactions or provide guideposts for distinguishing between them in the future.

  • Muting Trump’s “Megaphone” Easier Said Than Done

    How do you cover Donald Trump? He’s going to do a lot of speeches, and parts of his message will be provably false, reflect intolerance, and promote anti-democratic ideas. Political experts suggest ways media can blunt the former president’s skillful manipulation of coverage to disseminate falsehoods and spread messages which are often sharply divisive and periodically dangerous.

  • The ‘Truther Playbook’: Tactics That Explain Vaccine Conspiracy Theorist RFK Jr’s Presidential Momentum

    Polls show that Robert Kennedy’s Jr., promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, has been drawing surprising early support in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy is using the “truther playbook” - – promising identity and belonging, revealing “true” knowledge, providing meaning and purpose, and promising leadership and guidance – which prove to be appealing in our current post-truth era, in which opinions often triumph over facts, and in which charlatans can achieve authority by framing their opponents as corrupt and evil and claiming to expose this corruption. These rhetorical techniques can be used to promote populist politics just as much as anti-vaccine content.

  • Six Pressing Questions We Must Ask About Generative AI

    The past twenty-five years have demonstrated that waiting until after harms occur to implement internet safeguards fails to protect users. The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) lends an unprecedented urgency to these concerns as this technology outpaces what regulations we have in place to keep the internet safe.

  • Research Shows How Terrorism Affects Our Language and Voting Patterns

    Following the series of terrorist attacks between 2015 and 2017, German twitter users shifted their language towards that of the far right AfD party. Eventually voters rewarded the party at the 2017 election.

  • CCP’s Increasingly Sophisticated Cyber-enabled Influence Operation

    Last week DOJ announced police officers from China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. The announcement marked the first definitive public attribution to a specific Chinese government agency of covert malign activities on social media. The MPS, however, is one of many party-controlled organizations that analysts have long suspected of conducting covert and coercive operations to influence users on social media.

  • The 2020 Election Saw Fewer People Clicking on Misinformation Websites: Study

    Stanford scholars find a smaller percentage of Americans visited unreliable websites in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. election than in 2016 – which suggests mitigation and education efforts to identify misinformation are working.

  • Banning TikTok Could Weaken Personal Cybersecurity

    TikTok is not be the first app to be scrutinized over the potential exposure of U.S. user data, but it is the first widely used app that the U.S. government has proposed banning over privacy and security concerns. As a cybersecurity researcher, I see potential risks if the U.S. attempts to ban TikTok. The type of risk depends on the type of ban.

  • Anti-Zionism as Antisemitism: How Anti-Zionist Language from the Left and Right Vilifies Jews

    Seven decades after Israel’s founding, some criticism of the country continues to promote age-old antisemitic tropes. Even before Israel was founded, conversations about the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel at times included explicit anti-Jewish animus or espoused ideas historically wielded against Jewish communities. Today, many anti-Zionist activists continue to perpetuate this language.

  • Study Links Hard-Right Social Media with Incidents of Civil Unrest

    An increase in social media activity on “hard-right” platforms — those that purport to represent viewpoints not welcome on “mainstream” platforms — contributes to rightwing civil unrest in the United States, according to a new study. A new Yale-led study finds evidence that social media activity on hard-right platforms contributes to political unrest offline. “The magnitude of the effect we found is modest but two characteristics of social media and civil unrest caution against dismissing it,” said Yale sociologist Daniel Karell.

  • Democracies Must Regulate Digital Agents of Influence

    It would be a mistake to limit the public policy debate to traditional state-on-state espionage or major power rivalry. Such platforms and the advent of the eerily relatable artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT are society-changing technologies that cannot be dismissed as benign or treated as a public good closed to any regulatory or governance process.